


the seas around us

by drowninglovers



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, M/M, why don't you go to an aquarium and maybe you'll calm down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21646942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drowninglovers/pseuds/drowninglovers
Summary: Maybe it's because of who he is, who he's always been, but Harry thinks that watching sea creatures swim by without a care in the world is the closest humans can get to touching divinity.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Lady Silence | Silna/Henry Collins
Comments: 11
Kudos: 36
Collections: The Bowl of Oranges Cinematic Universe





	the seas around us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ceeninja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceeninja/gifts), [fellowshipofthegay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellowshipofthegay/gifts).



> -title (and eventual quotation) from the eponymous book by rachel carson  
> -i've tried to recreate the london aquarium as best i could from the website and some maps i found but have not been myself. any glaring inconsistencies are my own

It has been 271 days since Harry woke up. Possibly 272 depending on how you count things, if you count them at all. But for Harry, things will always be split evenly in two. First, in 1845. Before the ship left port in Greenhithe, and everything after that. Then, 2019. His first life—that’s the most apt description he can come up with—and the one he only recently (re)started. It isn’t as though everything he lived before now is completely negated by the realization that he’s lived so much before then. However, it is difficult to reconcile with the fact that this life isn’t the only one he’s had. Sometimes, it all gets to be too much, the weight of his past life weighing on his chest. Memories like suffocation boring down upon him until he’s stuck spiraling over decisions he cannot change. They were all dying, it was just a matter of time. But maybe if he could have eased someone’s suffering or helped someone else live a while longer. Maybe if he had done one thing different they would have had more of a chance—

But there’s no use in dwelling on the past. Not when they’ve been given a second chance like this. It’s easy to fall into that sort of trap. Luckily, there are dozens of ways he can combat these worries. Therapy, mostly. Not that they can tell anybody what happened to them unless it’s in the most oblique way possible, but it helps to have someone to talk to about other things. Not being in the Navy also helps. Eating food that isn’t slowly poisoning them does wonders for one’s health. Most of them agree that it helps to research, find out what they can about their families’ fate to try and get some closure. It doesn’t always help. He doesn’t know if it’s worse not knowing what happened to Archie and Joseph, how he’s supposed to live with the knowledge that Robert joined two expeditions trying to find him and came back empty-handed. 

There are a great deal of other things he’s grateful to have the second time around. Indoor plumbing. Food safety standards. No more sodomy laws. The internet (which can go either way, sometimes he wishes it was 1845 so he wouldn’t be constantly bombarded with news about how the world is quite literally on fire and everything is happening so much at once. But it also grants him several lifetimes worth of knowledge at his fingertips, GIFs of otters holding hands so they don’t float away, and easy communication with his old shipmates). Novelty socks. Faster trains. Vaccines. 

People have started pairing up. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Nobody’s in danger of getting lashed now. Things that never have the chance to flourish on the ice have a chance of sticking now that they’re on solid ground. More accurately, it'd be ‘tripling up’ in their case, though it doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Harry’s been volunteering at the aquarium since before he was woken up. He will probably continue to volunteer at the aquarium until his body physically begins to rot. Whenever things get to be too much for him and he has a spare block of time he swings by. Either to help with school groups queueing to touch starfish, or just to sit in front of the tanks and think. Maybe it's because of who he is, who he's always been, but he thinks that watching sea creatures swim by without a care in the world is the closest humans can get to touching divinity. There is healing to be found in the act of acknowledging how small humanity is in the framework of the universe. 

This dedication to the SEA LIFE Centre London Aquarium is part of the reason why the very bewildered employee on the cash register (a new hire, Harry remembers, an arts student from up north trying to get a jump start on paying off student loans) nods when their coworker says Tuunbaq should be allowed entry even though emotional support animals aren't technically allowed inside. The other reason is the very convincing stares given by Silna and Tuunbaq.

Sometimes, he has trouble remembering that Tuunbaq is _their_ Tuunbaq and not some cleverly named animal. It isn’t that he forgets, but it’s hard to look at a dog that he knows will roll over and expose his belly (quite literally, though he doesn’t let anyone but Silna pet him there) and barks at shows about veterinarians with the beast he knew on King William Island. Logically, he knows that Tuunbaq is still Tuunbaq despite his form, still powerful and ancient, still very capable of ripping him apart, but sometimes the glamour slips. Sometimes he imagines that they’re all just ordinary people and Tuunbaq an ordinary dog. None of this reincarnation business, no familiarity with hunger beyond getting peckish between meals, no previous acquaintance with the moment of reprieve that flashes in a man’s eyes before they go dark forever. Ordinary people with ordinary problems.

But it was never going to be that way was it. They were always going to carry these things with them. 

Silna holds out her wrist to receive a day-glo orange bracelet, then ties one around Tuunbaq’s leash. Meanwhile, Henry’s still at the front of the giftshop, entranced either by the absolutely massive stuffed walrus in danger of toppling off the shelf and crushing a keychain display, or the novelty socks featuring sharks holding pool cues.

Henry was the one who suggested this. A week ago, fiddling with a stray thread on the cuff of his jumper, he said: “I read this study by the BBC. It said that looking at aquariums can help to your lower blood pressure and heart rate. I don’t know if this is true, I mean it was published by the BBC but I don’t know if they were taking into account, well, people like me. But I thought it could...help maybe. And I thought, since you both like it there ...I thought we could all go together?”

And that was it really. That was all it took. 

Henry adjusted to Tuunbaq remarkably well considering their last encounter involved his soul getting eaten. Perhaps it helped that he wasn’t of sound mind and body when it happened. There were apologies on both sides. Like most of their ragtag group of survivors, Henry finds it easiest to see Tuunbaq as a dog first. Not to forget what he is, nature cannot change so easily, but compartmentalization helps. Perhaps it also helps that Tuunbaq is quite large and quite fluffy, and on the rare instances that he allows it, he's excellent to hug.

In hindsight, Tuunbaq may have been the easy part. 

Two more day-glo bracelets are attached to wrists and one more concerned look is directed at Tuunbaq who looks very...interested? in a photo of the aquarium’s new animated polar bear cub, Artie. Then they’re off. The route that Harry planned out, the route that should provide the least amount of stressors for Henry, isn’t very practical, but that doesn’t mean anything to him. What does practical matter in cases like this? Henry swore he’d never told a soul what he saw underwater until after he woke up. Not even when he was going to Dr. Stanley for help, he never breathed a word. 

They’ll start in his favourite area: the rockpools. It’s where he stays when he volunteers. Better to work with his strengths, that’s what he’s always been told. Though by that logic, he’d be equally as helpful in the polar adventure section; though not quite in the way anyone expected. 

Despite the fact that Silna and Henry have heard his rockpool speech and then some, he gives it anyway. Explains that sea stars live in every one of the world’s oceans and, while most species have 5 limbs (as does the prevailing image of them), some can have up to 24. Further down the tank, Silna sticks a hand in the water and does not flinch when it’s colder than expected. She extends a finger towards an anemone, then hesitates. She does this every time, and every time Harry reassures her that these anemones aren’t dangerous.

“They’re safe to touch. Their stings aren't strong enough to feel. Besides, I wouldn’t let you plunge your hand into an anemone tank if it weren’t safe.”

“I know that. But all I can think of is _Finding Nemo_.”

Harry thinks there’s more to it than that, remembers that anemones are venomous and reaching out to touch a predator is something they’re trained from birth not to do. It’s all about trust. Sea anemones lack brains, blood, or hearts and there’s something incredible about that. How evolution allows them to lack the things that humans wouldn't exist without.

Henry meanwhile, has become fascinated by the sea stars and their tentacles. Wrist-deep in the pool, he experimentally waggles his fingers, just brushing the star’s bumpy skin. The action prompts a surprised little laugh. 

His favourite part of the rockpools, and the part where he always loses people when he’s volunteering because their eyes begin to glaze over, or they make up excuses to get out of the rest of his lecture, is the crabs. European shore crabs, or, _carcinous maenous_. From the Greek καρκίνος. The one he’s petting now, who he’s nicknamed Jane, is a beautiful shade of grey. The action of drawing his fingertips over her shell, it feels like remembering. Knee-deep in tidepools showing off an assortment of sea slugs and molluscs to a bemused Fitzjames. Salt-kissed and sun-dappled. Copying diagrams and taxonomy by lamplight in his school days. Comparing specimens with his siblings under their father's watchful eye. 

Up next is the ray tank. Despite the fact that the tank is open, guests are not allowed to touch anything. But Harry knows that when touching rays you have to be careful. Two fingers along their spines. Once he even saw a ray beg a back rub off the keeper in charge of feeding it. They stay for the feeding tour and this room is a little louder than the others, a few tourist families peer into the water as the rays gobble up the shrimp presented to them. One particularly inquisitive ray pokes its nose slightly above the water and looks at Tuunbaq, who’s maintaining a respectful distance. Nobody’s given them any trouble, because everyone working there knows Harry, because Tuunbaq has an official entry bracelet tied around his leash, or because he’s on his best behaviour. That doesn’t stop a child of about 5 or 6 from looking at him with huge eyes only to be crestfallen when his mother points out the service dog vest and says that Tuunbaq is working. As a concession, Harry watches in awe as Tuunbaq looks purposefully back at the child before wiggling his ears. When they continue to the next area, he hears Silna mumble something which he estimates—it’s easier to learn Inuktitut in 2019, but he’s still got a ways to go—is close to ‘that was very nice of you’.

This display is counteracted by his behaviour in the polar adventure area. They don’t linger there, the only thing it has that they didn’t encounter in real life is a colony of penguins, and even penguins can be easily found at zoos. Tuunbaq’s eyes lock onto a screen showing Artie, one of the aquarium’s newest concessions: an augmented reality polar bear cub who leads visitors through Arctic Survival 101 and is Tuunbaq’s worst enemy who he didn’t _eat_ last time around. Early in their courtship (which is a terribly old-fashioned word, but Harry can’t help but be terribly old-fashioned in some regards. And this did feel very much like courtship) he brought home an Artie stuffed animal from the giftshop. Dog-Tuunbaq has a long and sordid history of ripping apart most toys presented to him. Artie was no exception, though Harry assumed that maybe something close to his own kind would go unscathed. Unfortunately, Tuunbaq proved to be an efficient executioner in severing Artie's head from his shoulders and leaving a trail of stuffing and beans in his wake.

Their encounter this time goes smoother, if only because Tuunbaq cannot possibly eat the screens. That doesn’t stop him from parking himself in front of an image of Artie scampering across the tundra. His face takes on a look of offense as he bores into Artie’s soulless, animated eyes. After tugging on his leash for half a minute, Silna gives up and retrieves her phone. Moments later, a notification pops up from the groupchat—a video only about 7 seconds long zooming in first on Tuunbaq’s offense and horror, then zooming in even closer on Artie. It’s captioned ‘an IMPOSTER’. 

Almost immediately another message pops up from Peglar reading ‘best picture 2020’ followed by an assortment of film-related emojis. After that, _‘several people are typing’_ appears at the bottom of his screen. Harry elects to set his phone to silent. The hand that was holding it holds Henry’s instead.

From there they visit a rainforest exhibit—where a keeper holding an armful of baby crocodiles that sound remarkably like laser guns waves at Harry using one of the crocodiles’ tiny arms—and another on crabs, where Harry doesn’t give into the urge to lecture about various species until he goes hoarse because he doesn’t want it to be overwhelming. The group of them spend what must be twenty minutes in front of the jellyfish, transfixed by their grace as they bob up and down, their tendrils spilling out beneath them. It’s then that their peaceful day is briefly interrupted by a gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren who also want to see the jellies. Before Tuunbaq gets blocked against the tank (or someone tries to pet him despite the vest and everything else) Silna easily navigates them onto the next room.

In their trip, they avoid certain areas. The shark walk for one, though it’s unavoidable, the aquarium’s designed so that traffic only goes one way and that way involves walking over the shark tank. There are better vantage points to see the sharks from, so they walk over quickly. At the entrance to the ocean tunnel, he hears Henry’s breath catch in his throat. He and Silna flank him, each taking a hand. When given the opportunity to close his eyes as they guide him through it, Henry elects to keep them open. It’s better that he can see what _is_ above them rather being left to imagine what _could_ be.

Recalling the dive isn’t something he partakes in, the same way Silna does not speak of the father she had before, the same way Harry can hardly think about those last, fraught days in the mutineers camp without remembering how the glass cut so easy into his veins. It’s odd, thinking that in a way he survived a suicide attempt. Something to bring up with his therapist (in more coded terms, of course) next week.

But they make it through the tunnel unscathed, quickly as they can. Henry even chances a glance above him as a green sea turtle with a damaged shell passes overhead. Everything in the water is perfectly expected. Billy Orren won’t be coming back. There’s a method to Tuunbaq’s reincarnation and only men who he encountered get the privilege of a second life. When Billy went overboard, he died for good. David Young too. And Tom Hartnell’s going to have a missing spot on his right side for the rest of his life. They didn’t get to choose who got left behind anymore than they chose to come back. 

For obvious reasons they avoid the shipwreck in the open ocean display. 

Harry’s favourite room might be the one they’re in now: the Atlantic coasts with its floor to ceiling tanks and soothing music. Since the room is relatively empty—there’s an older couple sitting on benches but no sign of the school group from earlier—they park themselves right in front of the tank and watch. 

After he woke up, he spent days buried in research. There had to be some reason why their ships were stuck in the ice for so long, some meteorological phenomena. Instead he found article after article theorising on their cause of death. About a third of them were close, as close to the truth as they could get without being written off as clinically insane. And how sad is that, that the explanation nobody would believe is the truth. A cruel twist on Occam’s razor. Sure, it is somewhat heartwarming that people still care about them over a century and a half after they vanished, and yes, he cried when he first saw the photos of _Terror_ and _Erebus_ , but it’s a bit like a haunting. People are publishing research about them, speculating on their fates and writing novels about their last days and none of them can ever say ‘no it wasn’t like that’. They aren't dead but they died and there's a difference between those two things that they'll never be able to explain. His current self is being consumed by his old one. Someday he wakes up and feels the weight of 1840s Harry crushing him as if to say ‘why do you get to live when I have to be a memory?’

If archaeologists were to stumble upon the remnants of their campsites, would they even find bones? Or are they living in borrowed bodies? 

He’d give it all back if he could. No more vaccines and high-speed trains and the world at his fingertips if it meant that they didn’t have to die like that. Nobody should have died like that. But it isn’t the fact that he died that keeps him up at night it’s the fact that they vanished. 120 families were left with gaps in their portraits, had to register their sons, their brothers, husbands, and fathers as deceased when it became clear that nobody was ever going to come back. The worst part, Harry thinks, is that their deaths weren’t enough to deter people from trying to find the passage. He loves exploration, there are few things in this world he finds more enjoyable than spending an afternoon engrossed in a research rabbithole, one thing leading to another until he cannot remember his original topic. But exploration should never come at the cost of life or land. Weren’t their lives enough to discourage future expeditions or were they just collateral? 

The Arctic ice is melting now. They’d have done anything for that to happen in 1847 and now it’s just another item in a long list of human tragedies.

There are some things in his life that are constant. Harry will always have ties to the sea. He will always put others first. Human beings will always continue to push forward even when they shouldn’t. Everything is returned to the tides. The serpent eats its own tail. All those Terrors and Erebites were brought back to life by their own destruction. Some things are always meant to be cyclical but perhaps life isn’t one of them. Perhaps Tuunbaq brought them back not just for reconcile but so they got a chance to move on, give their old lives the burials they deserved. He does not need to continue like this with one foot in the past, his heart cleft in twain. Existing here and now and knowing he can make a difference ought to be enough. 

On one side of him, Henry points out an octopus crawling along the bottom of the tank so well camouflaged it takes a moment for his eyes to track it. He thinks about how octopi can reconfigure their bodies to fit through any space bigger than their eyeballs. Their vision is the only obstacle they face in reconstruction. The sea is beautiful and full of wonder, it also tried to kill them. These two realities exist side by side. Silna gestures with the nub of her pencil to a particularly ugly looking fish that crawls by their vision. Her sketchpad is filled with rough outlines of sharks and seals, half-finished pencil sketches that are enough the way they are. Tuunbaq lies beside her, stretched out like he might be asleep save for his eyes which are brilliantly alive, tracking the movement of a school of fish in their endless laps of the tank.

The first week after he woke up, Harry sat down and reread Rachel Carson’s _The Seas Around Us_ , a book he carried in his backpack every day of his final year of undergrad until the cover physically fell off. It’s different reading it now that he has his memories back. Before, it was so easy to think of the sea as a mother, one of the last pure forces for good left in the world. Now he knows that the sea is neither good nor bad, it simply is. Nature does not conspire against them. Everything comes back in with the tides. Maybe they just came home. 

_Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively_

**Author's Note:**

> -last month i had a pretty severe wave (ha, wave) of depression around the anniversary of some serious medical problems. to combat this i went to one of my favourite aquariums and i swear on my life that i sat in front of the sharks and felt something rearrange inside of me. that's this fic's origin story. anyway  
> -the bbc study collins mentions is real! you can read it [here](https://https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33716589)  
> -there's a coda to this fic about collins buying the enormous gift store walrus but i didn't write it because i thought it'd be too schmoopy  
> -i'm [@nedlittle](https://nedlittle.tumblr.com) on tumblr and [@kitnotmarlowe](https://twitter.com/kitnotmarlowe) on twitter  
> 


End file.
